Infor, a leading provider of beautiful business applications specialized by industry and built for the cloud, and Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ: WFM) today announced a partnership designed to redefine retail management software. The companies will build a new, cloud-based retail management solution for Whole Foods Market that is expected to enable the grocer to operate faster and more efficiently while enhancing customer experience. The new retail management suite, Infor CloudSuite™ Retail, will also be made available to companies in the retail industry.

"The new retail platform we will co-create with Infor will be unlike anything currently on the market, better leveraging major technology advances to deliver much more value at lower cost," said Jason Buechel, executive vice president and chief information officer of Whole Foods Market. "With Infor, Whole Foods Market has found a partner ideally suited to help us co-create a new retail platform that enables a more efficient, connected enterprise with greater visibility, flexibility, insight, and ease-of-use for our team members - all while delivering a better end-to-end shopping experience for our customers."

Through a combination of cloud-based automation and more advanced, efficient processes for a wide variety of strategic merchandising and supply chain management functions, Whole Foods Market expects the new platform's advanced analytics to provide insights that will drive business performance and operational efficiencies. The new platform's advanced IT infrastructure is also expected to deliver more in-depth information and an enhanced shopping experiences for Whole Foods Market customers both in-store and online through Whole Foods Market's digital channels.

Infor today also announced details of its plan to develop the next-generation end-to-end retail software suite, with Whole Foods Market serving as a collaborative partner in the endeavor. Through the partnership, Whole Foods Market will become a working lab for Infor development engineers and designers from Hook & Loop, Infor's Manhattan-based internal design agency. Infor teams will work alongside Whole Foods Market team members to identify critical process improvements and develop a purpose-built software suite that enables Whole Foods Market to make better and faster decisions, take advantage of modern technologies like cloud and open source, and deliver a better experience back to its customers.

"Over the last five years, Infor has pioneered the modernization of enterprise software, from the focus on design as a core competency, to the embrace of open source technology, to the delivery of mission-critical ERP in a multi-tenant cloud," said Duncan Angove, President of Infor. "By partnering with Whole Foods Market, a company that shares our vision, values, and culture, Infor is poised to disrupt the retail software industry, helping companies use data science to drive real-time decisions and a consistent, beautiful experience that keeps customers coming back again-and-again."